Here’s the thing: I really love Nintendos approach of bringing back its own old consoles. The possibility of playing those games without a hassle on your current HDMI TV is really nice and makes them much more accessible. Also the NES Classic Mini brought us the power of 4 save games each for its games. That is really cool. Now, as recently revealed on the Gamescom, the SNES Classic Mini brings us another great feature: rewinding play states. That should make some of the harder games or games with a high chance factor much easier.
But that’s not what I meant when I said, I love it. What I meant is the design of the menu, the consoles start screen. For the NES Classic Mini there was a menu which looked like it could have been invented in the time when the NES was top notch. Colors, shades, forms, buttons, icons, everything looked like it could have been taken from any classic original NES game. And that’s not only the visuals, but the sounds as well. The menu music sounds like it could have been hidden in a drawer for the last twenty something years and been only recently just discovered.
Now we’ve seen the same from Nintendos upcoming Classic Mini Console: the SNES. And I couldn’t have imagined it better: It looks just like it could have sprung out of the 90s. The icons look kind of familiar and the first impression might be, that the menu is the same as it was with the NES Classic Mini, but no. This time, it looks like it could have been made for the SNES in it’s glorious time. The shading of the icons much more resembles the SNES era. The rounded, embossed borders look like everything from the SNES. The fonts look like from the SNES. The music also has this ‚SNES’y feeling with coin sounds and its 90s synthesizer style. I absolutely love it.
What I am now really looking forward to is seeing this menu evolve. There’s no doubt about it, but Nintendo will bring all its stationary consoles back in a mini version. The next would be the N64 classic mini with maybe some simple low-textured polygonized menu style. The Gamecube classic mini would have some more detailed 3d graphics, the wii accordingly. I cannot imagine a mini version of the wii u yet, but I suppose it would clone its current menu style. But whatever you are bringing, Nintendo, I am eager to see it.